...."

11

When a man has found and won his mate then the best traditions demand
a lyrical interlude. It should be possible to tell, in that
ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost
uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring
that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy
lover. This at any rate was what White had always done in his novels
hitherto, and what he would certainly have done at this point had he had
the telling of Benham's story uncontrolledly in his hands. But, indeed,
indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart has not this simplicity.
Only the heroes of romance, and a few strong simple clean-shaven
Americans have that much emotional integrity. (And even the Americans do
at times seem to an observant eye to be putting in work at the job and
keeping up their gladness.) Benham was excited that night, but not
in the proper bright-eyed, red-cheeked way; he did not dance down the
village street of Harting to his harbour at the Ship, and the expression
in his eyes as he sat on the edge of his bed was not the deep elemental
wonder one could have wished there, but amazement. Do not suppose
that he did not love Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not
triumphantly glad to have won her, that the image of the two armour-clad
lovers was not still striding and flourishing through the lit wilderness
of his imagination. For three weeks things had pointed him to this.
They would do everything together now, he and his mate, they would scale
mountains together and ride side by side towards ruined cities across
the deserts of the World. He could have wished no better thing. But at
the same time, even as he felt and admitted this and rejoiced at it, the
sky of his mind was black with consternation....

It is remarkable, White reflected, as he turned over the abundant but
confused notes upon this perplexing phase of Benham's development that
lay in the third drawer devoted to the Second Limitation, how dependent
human beings are upon statement. Man is the animal that states a case.
He lives not in things but in expressed ideas, and what was troubling
Benham inordinately that night, a night that should have been devoted to
purely blissful and exalted expectations, was the sheer impossibility of
stating what had happened in any terms that would be tolerable either
to Mrs. Skelmersdale or Lady Marayne. The thing had happened with the
s